The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is organising a worldwide ‘NameExoWorlds’ contest to give popular names to selected exoplanets along with their host stars. For the first time in history, the public will be able to give an official name to stars and planets.

The competition is only open to astronomical organisations and we have decided to enter!

The IAU have provided a list of 260 ExoWorlds (exoplanetary systems and their host stars). The first round of the NameExoWorlds contest involves shortlisting 20 of these and submitting these to the IAU as our Flamsteed favourites so that they can be taken into the next round of the contest.

We would like your help in deciding which ExoWorlds to put forward to the next round. To narrow down this list, we have decided to only nominate ExoWorlds where the host star is visible to the naked eye and located within the Northern Hemisphere. Should we win, it’d be great to be able to be able to point out our ExoWorld!

There are three pages in this online poll. Please vote for one ExoWorld on each page.

You have until Saturday 14th February to cast your votes. Voting will close at 12:00 (GMT), where the 20 most popular ExoWorlds will form the Flamsteed nomination and be submitted to the IAU.

Further details of this contest will be provided in the next round of the contest (the dates of which have not been disclosed by the IAU). The next round will involve naming one ExoWorld. Winning public names will not replace the scientific designations, but will be recognized by the IAU as the publicly used name for the object(s), and be publicized as such, along with due credit to the organization that proposed it. For further information about this contest, please visit http://www.nameexoworlds.org.

Well done for entering our society, Christina. If Flamsteed gets to name one, what will you name it?

I like that one of the exoplanets has a moon!!! I mean, wow, they actually detected exomoons!?! How on earth (so to speak) did they do that?!

I voted for a balance of very large exoplanets and decent naked eye magnitude because my thinking is that gas planets can have lots of moons which potentially could host life themselves. Larger the planet, more moons? Our Jupiter is whole mini solar system by itself.

I was voting for one exoplanet and suddenly changed my mind when I saw the speed of its orbit around its host was 3 days. If there was life on that planet or on one of its moons, it will be a bloody nauseating life with vomit everywhere…

Good to hear that you’ve submitted your vote, Tej! Every vote counts!!!

This is a Flamsteed effort and I am merely helping facilitate this on our behalf. The intention is that Flamsteed members will decide what we submit to the IAU and ultimately what we propose to name our chosen ExoWorld in the next phase of the competition. Can’t wait to see how this pans out!

Like you, I was interested to read about HD 33564, a star located in the Camelopardalis constellation with a planet that’s potentially within the habitable zone! My vote was torn between this and Kappa Coronae Borealis or 70 Virginis. The thought of there being a debris disk within these worlds draws me towards them, perhaps because it reminds me of the Kuiper belt within our Solar System. It entices me to question whether there might be more planets that haven’t been detected as yet within these systems: dwarf planets a bit like Pluto, perhaps…

gas planets can have lots of moons which potentially could host life themselves. Larger the planet, more moons? Our Jupiter is whole mini solar system by itself.

Now this is an interesting thought! Hadn’t thought of this!

I guess, the larger the planet, the larger it’s potential moons and perhaps the more suited to habitability they would be? My thinking is that perhaps position away from the host star matters in terms of how many moons a planets has… Just by comparing this to our own Solar System, where planets close to our Sun have no moons, Earth has one, Mars has two… It seems that the further out you go, the more Moons a planet is likely to have, no matter the size (little Pluto has at least 5, I think).

I guess, the larger the planet, the larger it’s potential moons and perhaps the more suited to habitability they would be? My thinking is that perhaps position away from the host star matters in terms of how many moons a planets has… Just by comparing this to our own Solar System, where planets close to our Sun have no moons, Earth has one, Mars has two… It seems that the further out you go, the more Moons a planet is likely to have, no matter the size (little Pluto has at least 5, I think).

Thats a good thought and observation too! But also, those gas planets in near orbits to the parent star are likely to have originated from much much further out where gas planets normally form and somehow have spiralled in. So I like to think its still feasible to hold out hope for them to have plenty of moons 🙂 But its such a huge mystery as to how these gas planets ended up in such close orbits…and with such regular occurrence! Although, it may be perceived as a regular occurrence only because we still don’t quite have the technology to detect the significant number of smaller rocky planets that surely must be in abundance among the stars, dont you think?

its such a huge mystery as to how these gas planets ended up in such close orbits…and with such regular occurrence!

True. Is our Solar System ‘special’? Is it the norm to find large, gassier planets orbiting close to their star? Or is it, as you say, perceived that way simply because we have yet to detect smaller, rockier planets? So many questions 🙂

.. And thank you for voting! You may be interested to hear that Upsilon Andromedae was significantly popular amongst Flamsteed members. Fingers crossed it gets picked by the IAU and put through to the next round!

We counted up the results, submitted the nominations and now the IAU have notified us of the ExoWords that have made it through to the next round.

Great news! The IAU has chosen Upsilon Andromedae, one of our society’s favourite ExoWorlds to name. Congratulations to all those who took part! We would now like your help in deciding what to call the host star and each of the three exoplanets found within this system.

Here’s a little information about Upsilon Andromedae to help you get creative when coming up with a name:

Upsilon Andromedae is very easy to find, being the “left knee” of Andromeda. Roughly mid-way between Mirach and Almach is a faint triangle of stars. Upsilon Andromedae is the upper-right star in this group. With a magnitude of 4.1, it is at the limits of naked eye visibility in London’s skies.

Upsilon Andromedae is a binary star located approximately 44 light-years from Earth. The primary star is an F-type main-sequence star that is younger than the Sun. The second star is a red dwarf in a wide orbit around the primary. With three confirmed planets, this was the first multi-planet system found around a multi-star system by Doppler spectroscopy. A fourth, long-period planet may orbit beyond the three known planets (this is not nameable).

The inner planet, a “hot Jupiter” so close to the star that its orbit is only a few days (its ‘year’ would be only 4.6 days), was discovered in 1996, and the two larger outer planets, with elongated orbits that perturb each other strongly, were discovered in 1999. One of these would have a mass of 14 Jupiters and take 242 days to circle Upsilon, in an oval orbit about 129 million kilometres from the star. The third planet is about 10 times the mass of Jupiter. It is even further away at 400 million kilometres. It takes about four Earth years to circle the star.

Its Flamsteed designation is 50 Andromedae (assigned in order of increasing right ascension), but there is an oddity here. Bayer described a 5th-magnitude star in Andromeda’s knee as Upsilon. However, he was apparently referring to HR 483 (which is closer to Almach). The error originated from Flamsteed, who noted that 50 Andromedae was the same as Bayer’s Upsilon. It is not. Bayer didn’t note 50 Andromedae at all (though Ptolemy did – marking it as “18”).

John Bevis discovered the error noting that “the character Upsilon is wrongly placed before the 50th (of Flamsteed) or Ptolemy’s 18th”. Bevis correctly assigned Upsilon to HR 483, and assigned his own letter “a” to Flamsteed’s 50 (also known as HR 458).

Francis Baily also caught the mistake, and removed Upsilon from 50 Andromedae and assigned it to HR 483 in his revised edition of Flamsteed’s catalogue.

However, Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander disagreed and thought that the error was a mistake of several degrees in Tycho’s catalogue, which misled Bayer. He felt that Upsilon was the equivalent of Flamsteed 50. Baily remained unconvinced, but despite his repeated efforts to set matters right, most astronomers persisted in designating 50 as Upsilon.

Even more oddly, Flamsteed did observe HR 483, but it was omitted from his printed catalogue!

You may recall that a few months ago we asked you to vote for one group of names as proposed by Flamsteed members, that would become our submission in the worldwide ‘NameExoWorlds’ contest organized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

These names formed the final Flamsteed submission and were submitted to the IAU along with a detailed proposal that outlined reasons for these choices.

It’s not over just yet. We now need to win the public vote in order to secure the proposed names above for our chosen ExoWorld, Upsilon Andromedae.

If you would like to take part in the public vote (and I kindly encourage you to vote for our submission if you do), then please find a link below to the Upsilon Andromedae page on the IAU’s website where you would be able to do so: